It’s 2024. Is RoadTrippers finally better than TripWizard?

The Gripe

I was super excited when I got an email from RoadTrippers the other day about a feature request I had upvoted a long time ago. One of my biggest gripes about both RoadTrippers and TripWizard has long been that neither was capable of subtotaling a trip’s distance and duration by day. Both tools showed the total number of hours you’d spend on the road over the course of your trip, plus the number of miles you’d traverse, but somehow the concept of daily subtotals had never entered either product’s feature set. Both tools, I’d presume, are commonly used for planning long multi-day trips. Take us, for example. The vast majority of our RV trips span at least a week and include multiple travel days, each of which will cover several gas, rest, and sightseeing stops. Trips like this have got to be the most common use case for software like RoadTrippers and TripWizard. And yet, their ability to convey how far you’re going on any particular day becomes almost useless as soon as you spice up your itinerary with pesky trivialities like fuel stops. The more waypoints you add, the more you obscure your daily totals. To quote myself from way back in 2022:

Let’s say I’m going to drive from Austin, Texas to Wichita, Kansas in a single day. That’s 546 miles, which means at least two gas stops and at least two or three pit stops. If I insert a gas stop 293 miles away from Austin in Ardmore, Oklahoma, I can no longer can see the total distance between Austin and Wichita. Instead, I get this:

How many miles is it from Austin to Wichita again? Well let’s see, 293 plus 253 is… why am I having to calculate this manually?! Add a couple more gas stops and a pit stop or two and suddenly making road trip plans has become an exercise is arithmetic. This flaw makes it impossible to look at a multi-week trip and, at a glance, determine whether you’re within your personal mileage and time targets. The more stops you add, the harder it is to glean this information.

— Me, 2022

I was picking on TripWizard there, but RoadTrippers suffered from exactly the same deficiency. Then, out of absolutely nowhere, I got the email from RoadTrippers that double dog dared me to renew our long lapsed subscription.

That’s right—they had actually implemented daily subtotals! 🙌 🤯

This changes EVERYTHING! (…or does it?)

I was in the middle of my workday, but I took an early lunch and logged into RoadTrippers eager to see this amazing improvement in action. Since our subscription was no longer active, I was only able to create a trip with three measly stops—hardly the best way to exercise this technical marvel. My eyes flitted upwards, just north of trip itinerary panel, and focused on the bright red box that beamed Free trips are limited to 3 waypoints. Click here to upgrade your membership. Hmm. I didn’t really want to shell out the sixty bucks if the only thing it bought me was a big bowl of regret. But the allure of daily subtotals was strong and I clicked the button. Next I was presented with a large, enticing dialog box that dazzled me with an array of magnificent premium features that surely—surely!—I couldn’t resist. The price seemed reasonable only if it yielded the goods. A big blue button beckoned me. Click here to “start your free 7-day trial,” it said. Here we go…

An instant after securing my access to RoadTrippers premium, I logged into TripWizard in order to retrieve the plans for our upcoming “2024 Airstream Extravaganza”—a 17-day journey throughout the state of Colorado. With TripWizard on one side of my screen and RoadTrippers on the other, I begin the process of transposing each of our eight planned stops into a new itinerary within RoadTrippers. This exercise alone wouldn’t yield a sufficient appraisal of the new subtotaling functionality because our itinerary didn’t yet include any stops in between our destinations. The real test would begin when I started interlacing our primary destinations with waypoints for fuel, bathroom breaks, and other pit stops.

I didn’t even get to that point before disappointment began to set in.

With all eight of our stops entered—without any dates—the RoadTrippers itinerary panel initially looked great. But the moment I added a start date to the trip, my heart sank. The itinerary panel went from an information-dense listing of travel times and distances, destination names, and simple iconography to an exploded mess off excessive whitespace, oversized buttons, and disproportionately large typography. Before adding dates, I could see everything at a glance. Afterwards, half my itinerary was submerged below the viewable area of my very large screen. Take a look at the video below to see what I mean.

All my enthusiasm fizzled away like a bucket of cold water on a campfire. In addition to RoadTrippers’ terribly clumsy itinerary panel, I found the process of creating a trip less appealing than TripWizard’s approach. Not a ton less, but several small irritations all conspired to make TripWizard seem generally superior by comparison. And that’s disappointing to say because TripWizard isn’t exactly what I’d call a premier specimen of software engineering magnificence. It’s Good Enough™️ and not much more.

Here are three aspects of RoadTrippers’ user experience that further undermined my interest in using it in place of RV Life’s TripWizard.

When adding new stops to your itinerary, TripWizard asks where exactly on your itinerary you’d like that stop to go. RoadTrippers is weird. When initially creating an itinerary, there’s exactly one button that allows you to add more stops. It’s at the top of the panel and says “Add Waypoint”. When I used this button, I was never asked where each new stop should go on my itinerary. Instead, it just seemed to guess where it should go, and always guess wrong. A sensible default, I’d think, would be to insert new stops at the end of the current itinerary. But nope—RoadTrippers seemed to prefer dropping them somewhere in the middle of my list. Of course, it’s easy enough to drag your stops up or down the list, but of all places to plop them down, why in the middle? I was entering my stops chronologically, from first to last, and had to reorder every single one except the first. It got even weirder once I added a start date to my trip. After the itinerary panel exploded like a piñata, it magically sprouted new “Add Waypoint” buttons—one beneath each destination on the itinerary. I guess I just don’t understand the logic here. If those “new” buttons are intended so you can insert new waypoints exactly where you want them, why are they only visible after dates have been added the trip? I could have saved myself some needless dragging and dropping had RoadTrippers presented this ‘precision waypoint insertion’ option before I entered my dates.

The next distraction was the comparatively small supply of RV parks available on RoadTrippers versus TripWizard. This may change over time given RoadTrippers’ recent decision to subsume Campendium, but for now the gap remains noticeably wide. Although the road trip I demoed in the video above was indeed hypothetical, our real road trip planned for this summer from New Mexico to Colorado did in fact include two RV parks that were not listed in RoadTrippers’ database. That’s a problem I have rarely encountered in TripWizard, which seems to have one of the most extensive databases of RV parks around. Sometimes it can be a bit too extensive, as some long-since closed parks still show up in search results. Needless to say, when you’re planning a trip, the less manual data entry you have to perform, the better, giving TripWizard an advantage in this area.

The last thing I’ll mention is that RoadTrippers’ maps don’t do a great job highlighting the different segments of your trip. Take a look at the two animations below. When you hover your mouse over a given segment, RoadTrippers’ highlighting is so subtle you barely notice. TripWizard, on other hand, does a pretty good job here with its red highlighting. Why does this matter? If you look closely at the TripWizard gif below, you’ll see that the route overlaps itself in New Mexico. In RoadTrippers it’s difficult to see how the first and last segments of the trip differ because the highlighting is so soft. But TripWizard’s red highlighting make it very easy to see those details. It’s a little thing that I find it helpful and wouldn’t want to lose.

This changes nothing.

In the end, I barely got close enough to RoadTrippers’ new daily subtotal functionality to poke it with a long stick before I felt myself shrinking away, turned off by the inept design. I cancelled my trial and slunk back to TripWizard, defeated.

The choice between TripWizard and RoadTrippers is like deciding between a cold Happy Meal and an overdone steak for dinner. They’ll do the job, I guess, but—man—isn’t there anything better to eat?